


meet you in the middle

by spideywhiteys



Series: 365 Days of Naruto AUs [8]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Blood and Injury, F/M, Hunger Games AU, Mentions of Violence, Requited Unrequited Love, as expected, if that makes sense lol, introspective, oddly soft for the situation lol, talks of death and dying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28639194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spideywhiteys/pseuds/spideywhiteys
Summary: There's a lot they don't tell each other, beneath all that they do. Words of love, words of promise. Words that don't mean anything to anyone else but them. If only they had the time for it.
Relationships: Hyuuga Neji/Tenten
Series: 365 Days of Naruto AUs [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2086938
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	meet you in the middle

**Author's Note:**

> DAY 8: Hunger Games AU / Neji + Tenten

If she closes her eyes, she can still see home. Home is rolling fields surrounded by metal fences, spending hours tossing stones into rivers and running amok while holding onto the last vestiges of their childhood. It’s the salt of sweat on her tongue, the same tongue that complains when her friends push and push yet she never quits, not even then, not even when she says she will. The sun is the same. The same heat, same blinding, terrible light. An impossible star.

She thinks she remembers reading a book about stars once, back when books were things they were allowed to have. She must have been eight then, young enough to still have that terrible haircut, young enough to think nothing of dirtying her clothes despite her mother’s nagging. 

Young enough to not worry about death, because death is a concept children don’t grasp in its entirety until it’s upon then, tearing their last breaths from their fragile lungs. Too small. Too weak to fight inevitability.

Yes, Tenten remembers being that young. 

But those memories are only daydreams now, and death is an unwanted companion lurking at the edge of her vision. She thinks a natural death would be fine. One where she closes her eyes for the night and slips away, old and gray and content. But contentedness is a rare commodity and she’s just a girl. Just a girl with nothing special about her, not in the eyes of the world or in the eyes of the rich, who press hands to mouths like they’re trying to be polite in their excitement. In their enjoyment. Forked tongues and gold in their veins—poison. That’s what it is. Pretty to look at. A beautiful mask for a knife to the back. 

Running in those rolling fields, sneaking bread from the bakery, sweating out her afternoons and screaming her freedom to the clouds with her friends at her side—if she closes her eyes, she can see it so clearly. So clearly, like looking through glass straight to the past. 

But that’s the problem here. 

She was never free, not once. Her first cries on this wretched earth didn’t truly belong to her. They belonged to the whims of cruel money. _She_ belonged to the whims of blood that circulated bodies with no hearts. What a sham. What a dream. 

For years, she’d been able to pretend. She’d been able to blind herself to the truth by staring into the sun, until it soaked her retinas and she saw it when she shut her eyes. 

_I’m free._

Running and laughing and alive.

_This is freedom._

What a lie she’d woven for her own comfort. Shattered in an instant. The instant she stood, sixteen and just a girl of flesh and bone and beating heart, barely at the cusp of life, barely alive, barely living—the instant she stood because her name rang out like a gunshot, like the crack of lightning. Such a monumental thing. Just her name. And her whole life was reduced to nothing, to a game, to the likeness of cattle ready for slaughter. 

Tenten is sixteen and she walks to the stage with ice in her veins and a beating heart, ready to walk into the den of those who’ve long thrown theirs away. Her mother cries but there’s nothing to be done, nothing at all, because soldiers have trigger happy fingers and look at them like bugs underfoot. _Searching._ Waiting for an excuse to turn their soil into mud with spilled blood. 

It is quiet. 

This is fine. The odds feel insurmountable but maybe—maybe. If she allows herself to play with the ridiculous concept of hope….Maybe she will win. 

She is the female candidate for District 9.

Maybe she can do it. Tenten, a girl of simple flesh and bone, who lays in the sun too long and can string a bow better than any man in the entire district, who can throw a mean punch and is the most cautious of her closest friends—

Neji is the male candidate for District 9.

* * *

There can only be one survivor. 

* * *

Neji is nothing like the sun. Nothing like the ball of fire that warms the earth and endears itself to all. He has ice around his heart and a frigid set to his jaw that thaws when you least expect. They’ve spent countless days under the stars, under the clouds, under an awning when it rains and snows. She knows the way his nose scrunches when he’s furious. She knows the calluses on his fingertips and the way he’s patient and capable and one of the best workers they have around. They’ve braided each other's hair since they were children with too-clumsy fingers and sticky hands. 

She thinks she knows him like the back of her hand, like every vein and dip of bone, every wrinkle and pore. From the silky texture of his hair to the squareness of his jaw to the tense set of his mouth and eyes that look like purple moons. Neji sits in the stars, cold and far away but Tenten is the sun and she burns right beside him.

They sit in the car in silence and Tenten realizes that if one of them must win, the likely candidate is Neji. Because she is Tenten, just a girl, just a single star while he is a galaxy. He deserves it more.

* * *

If she closes her eyes, she can still see home.

Their hands bump, loose and lax on the expensive car seats. Their pinkies curl together. Pressed like flowers, fragile. Already plucked from the earth and on borrowed time. Limited time. This touch will wither and die. And Tenten will forgive him when the time comes.

It’s always her picking up the pieces, after all.

In the faint reflection of the window, she sees Neji looking out as well, blank faced like an empty canvas. He’s thinking. Concentrating. Features stagnant as his brain whirls and dumps theory upon theory on him like a waterfall. His eyes lower, his lashes drooping.

She reads him like those books they aren’t allowed to have anymore. She wants to tuck every memory of him into her chest, right beside her heart, so when she dies she’ll think only of those times. Because if they make it, just the two of them, all the way to the end—

Neji will kill her. Tenten will not become a tragedy. She refuses. She refuses to feel fear when it will be him who lives with the thunderous weight of the blood coating his hands.

And maybe she will die with this secret. With the words on her tongue swallowed away. Her cowardice will be washed away with no one the wiser.

_I love you._

* * *

It’s one thing to prepare yourself. It’s another to face it head on.

When the alarm blares, her heart jackrabbits in her throat like a separate entity. She feels like vomiting. Like coughing out her own vital organ and simply dying on the spot. What’s the point of all this? Suffering for someone’s sick enjoyment? 

What could they do if all the contestants killed themselves right off the bat? What then?

It’s too bad they all want to live. Desperately. Fervently. Enough to wander into the pits of hell willingly and shake hands with the devil. 

Tenten runs.

She pretends she’s in the fields, long grass tickling her shins and the back of her neck damp with sweat. The sun is over her head. She grabs a bag, any bag. It doesn’t even matter at this point. She can’t deliberate, can’t pause. There’s already fighting, already blood spilling across the ground and the death throes of those who never wanted to die. Tenten bites a hole in her cheek and tastes copper. 

Tenten runs, and Neji is beside her. They move in tandem, like in the fields, like they’re back home, like they aren’t running for their lives. She breathes easier with him here, easier knowing that if she were to die, she hopes it won’t be alone.

* * *

Tenten has never seen someone die.

“Give it to me.” Neji says.

“I can do it.”

He looks at her with the same lavender gaze, the same one that used to be wide and framed with the baby fat of childhood. His hands curl around hers and even his fingers are familiar. She loves him but she’s just a girl and hearts aren’t welcome around here.

“I know you can, but you don’t need to.” He is of the stars but he beats his fists bloody and raw against the atmosphere. He covers her eyes with his bruised palms because she always stares too long at the too bright sun, wondering. Wondering what hope is like, what it feels like on the other side of a fence at the edge of a field.

Sometimes she thinks he loves her too, in whatever complicated, icy way he can. Scared like he’s always been, scared like he’s too afraid to show because he was just a boy when his father’s name had been called and now here he is. In the world that killed his father. And he loves her, she knows. Maybe the same way, maybe not, but it’s love all the same and hearts only hurt here. 

He takes the knife from her hand and slits the throat of their captive. 

Tenten is good at making traps. She’s good at hunting and using a bow. She’s used to the spillage of blood across the earth, of the terrible quiet and soft touch that comes with the end of an animal’s life. 

_An animal._ She tells herself.

A man’s blood seeps into the dirt, wet and dark against weak, green blades of grass. His eyes dim and a canon sounds and they’re alive—her and Neji, alive. She doesn’t think about for how long. (How long it will last. Maybe another second, minute, hour, or maybe to the end. Where the inevitable will occur.)

Neji has never _seen_ someone die, either. But he listens to a death rattle and watches the sluggish spill of crimson from an empty sack of flesh that once held life and—

* * *

Neji does not have a mother or a father anymore. He has cousins and family that will miss him, but that’s just it. They are many. 

Tenten has a sickly mother and a father with her eyes who taught her everything she knows about weaponry and hunting. Just them. Neji knows this. Which is why he also knows that it will be _her_ family more devastated by the loss. Which is why he knows that he _will_ make them the last two, and then he will die.

And she will live. If she can’t bring a weapon to his flesh, then he will do it for her. He would never ask such a thing of her.

He will never tell her.

Because he knows Tenten like the way people know scents that remind them of home. Knows her like people remember the way their favorite food tastes even after months and years. The freckles on her cheeks and the faint wave to her hair when it’s freed from her buns. The lavender that clings to her skin, and the way he always finds her hiding in the bushes by the fence, staring at the sun like it holds all the answers and she just _can’t_ hear them, but maybe if she listens hard enough—

Neji thinks he fell in love with her when they were thirteen. With her laugh and the salty sun-sweat, the muscles of her biceps and forearms clenching as tight as the bow she draws, the glimmer of hazel in her eyes. Like the earth has sprouted into a living, breathing thing and that thing is her, nature incarnate.

They take turns sleeping, and he thinks about this while keeping alert. His drive keeps him awake as the false moon shines through the treetops. She is sleep-warm and soft at his side, in the way slumbering bodies are—because her muscles are no joke and there’s a wiry firmness to her that makes Neji glad, in a way, because she has a better chance of survival when she’s athletic.

He presses a thumb to the curve of her cheekbone, under closed eyes and the brush of amber-brown eyelashes, over a cluster of sun seared freckles. She breathes and she is alive and he will die.

* * *

She will die.

He will die.

She will die so he doesn’t have to.

He will die so she doesn’t have to.

They both pledge death for the other with their hearts on their tongue, ready to be offered up but never finding the time to do so. This is no place for hearts, after all. It’s a place for them to be gouged out and buried, where kindness is a death sentence and the only blood that matters is your own.

They will both die. Together, as they lived, with memories of happy, ignorant days at the forefront of their minds and far too much blood crusted under their fingernails.

* * *

(Or, they will both live.)

**Author's Note:**

> Follow / Support me on [Tumblr](https://spideyfoof.tumblr.com/) and let me know if you'd like to see more of this AU!


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